Research Database
Displaying 121 - 140 of 212
Post-fire management affects species composition but not Douglas-fir regeneration in the Klamath Mountains
Year: 2019
Ensuring adequate conifer regeneration after high severity wildfires is a common objective for ecologists and forest managers. In the Klamath region of Oregon and California, a global hotspot of botanical biodiversity, concerns over regeneration have led to post-fire management on many sites, which involves salvage logging followed by site preparation, conifer planting, and manual shrub release. To quantify the impacts of post-fire management, we sampled 62 field sites that burned at high severity nearly 20 years ago in the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountain bioregion, stratifying by management and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
To Masticate or Not: Useful Tips for Treating Forest, Woodland, and Shrubland Vegetation
Year: 2019
Forest managers use mastication to grind or shed vegetation to remove competition, prepare a site for natural or artificial regeneration, or release sapling-sized trees; or they use mastication to convert ladder fuels to surface fuels and enhance decomposition of biomass. However, determining the best mastication configuration within the context of management objectives and site limitations is challenging. This report synthesizes our current knowledge on mastication as a forest management tool. We found that excavators, skid steers, and tractors can all be carrier machines and different types…
Publication Type: Report
Out of the Ashes: Ecological Resilience to Extreme Wildfire, Prescribed Burns, and Indigenous Burning in Ecosystems
Year: 2019
Until Euro-American colonization, Indigenous people used fire to modify eco-cultural systems, developing robust Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). Since 1980, wildfire activity has increased due to fire suppression and climate change. In 2017, in Waterton Lakes National Park, AB, the Kenow wildfire burned 19,303 ha, exhibiting extreme fire behavior. It affected forests and the Eskerine Complex, a native-grass prairie treated with prescribed burns since 2006 to reduce aspen (Populus tremuloides) encroachment linked to fire suppression and bison (Bison bison bison) extirpation. One year…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severe Fire Danger Index: A Forecastable Metric to Inform Firefighter and Community Wildfire Risk Management
Year: 2019
Despite major advances in numerical weather prediction, few resources exist to forecast wildland fire danger conditions to support operational fire management decisions and community early-warning systems. Here we present the development and evaluation of a spatial fire danger index that can be used to assess historical events, forecast extreme fire danger, and communicate those conditions to both firefighters and the public. It uses two United States National Fire Danger Rating System indices that are related to fire intensity and spread potential. These indices are normalized, combined, and…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Fire and Forest Management in Montane Forests of the Northwestern States and California, USA
Year: 2019
We reviewed forest management in the mountainous regions of several northwestern states and California in the United States and how it has impacted current issues facing these forests. We focused on the large-scale activities like fire suppression and logging which resulted in landscape level changes. We divided the region into two main forests types; wet, like the forests in the Pacific Northwest, and dry, like the forests in the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges. In the wet forests, the history of intensive logging shaped the current forest structure, while fire suppression played a more…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Policy tools to address scale mismatches: insights from U.S. forest governance
Year: 2019
Recent literature has highlighted the growing array of scale mismatches in environmental governance and offered policy design principles for improved governance approaches. A next step is to develop our understanding of specific policy tools that can address scale mismatches. This paper reviews the range and importance of scale-related challenges and solutions in environmental governance, situating this discussion in the context of forest governance. We then tackle the matter of policy tools to address scale mismatches, by synthesizing findings from recent policy research on two…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cost-effective fuel treatment planning: a theoretical justification and case study
Year: 2019
Modelling the spatial prioritisation of fuel treatments and their net effect on values at risk is an important area for applied work as economic damages from wildfire continue to grow. We model and demonstrate a cost-effective fuel treatment planning algorithm using two ecosystem services as benefits for which fuel treatments are prioritised. We create a surface of expected fuel treatment costs to incorporate the heterogeneity in factors affecting the revenue and costs of fuel treatments, and then prioritise treatments based on a cost-effectiveness ratio to maximise the averted loss of…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Mixed-severity wildfire and habitat of an old-forest obligate
Year: 2019
The frequency, extent, and severity of wildfire strongly influence the structure and function of ecosystems. Mixed‐severity fire regimes are the most complex and least understood fire regimes, and variability of fire severity can occur at fine spatial and temporal scales, depending on previous disturbance history, topography, fuel continuity, vegetation type, and weather. During high fire weather in 2013, a complex of mixed‐severity wildfires burned across multiple ownerships within the Klamath‐Siskiyou ecoregion of southwestern Oregon where northern spotted owl (Strix occidentalis caurina)…
Publication Type: Journal Article
The missing fire: quantifying human exclusion of wildfire in Pacific Northwest forests, USA
Year: 2019
Western U.S. wildfire area burned has increased dramatically over the last half‐century. How contemporary extent and severity of wildfires compare to the pre‐settlement patterns to which ecosystems are adapted is debated. We compared large wildfires in Pacific Northwest forests from 1984 to 2015 to modeled historic fire regimes. Despite late twentieth‐century increases in area burned, we show that Pacific Northwest forests have experienced an order of magnitude less fire over 32 yr than expected under historic fire regimes. Within fires that have burned, severity distributions are…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Designing Operationally Relevant Daily Large Fire Containment Strategies Using Risk Assessment Results
Year: 2019
In this study, we aim to advance the optimization of daily large fire containment strategies for ground-based suppression resources by leveraging fire risk assessment results commonly used by fire managers in the western USA. We begin from an existing decision framework that spatially overlays fire risk assessment results with pre-identified potential wildland fire operational delineations (PODs), and then clusters PODs into a response POD (rPOD) using a mixed integer program (MIP) model to minimize expected loss. We improve and expand upon this decision framework through enhanced fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Forest landscapes as social-ecological systems and implications for management
Year: 2018
Many of the most pressing threats to forests result from complex interactions between multiple stressors and require management on large spatial and temporal scales. For this reason, many ecosystem managers have begun to recognize the need to consider the broader context of decisions, and how outcomes of past, present and future decisions in one location may interact with outcomes of such decisions in other locations nearby. The landscape has been put forth as an appropriate unit for such holistic approaches to management. However, as there are differing definitions of landscapes, it can be…
Publication Type: Journal Article
A comparison of the US National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) with recorded fire occurrence and final fire size
Year: 2018
Most previous research has assessed the ability of the National Fire Danger Rating System (NFDRS) to portray fire activity at either single sites or on small spatial scales, despite it being a nation-wide system. This study seeks to examine the relationships between a set of NFDRS fire danger indices (Fire Danger Ratings, Staffing Level and the Ignition Component) and measures of fire activity (fire occurrence and final fire size) across the entire conterminous US over an 8-year period. We reveal that different regions of the US display different levels of correspondence between each of the…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Wildfire risk reduction in the United States: Leadership staff perceptions of local fire department roles and responsibilities
Year: 2018
As wildland fires have had increasing negative impacts on a range of human values, in many parts of the United States (U.S.) and around the world, collaborative risk reduction efforts among agencies, homeowners, and fire departments are needed to improve wildfire safety and mitigate risk. Using interview data from 46 senior officers from local fire departments around the U.S., we examine how leadership staff view their departments’ roles and responsibilities in wildfire risk reduction. Overall, our findings indicate that local fire personnel are often performing a variety of mitigation tasks…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Cross-boundary cooperation for landscape management: Collective action and social exchange among individual private forest landowners
Year: 2018
The landscape is an ideal spatial extent for managing forests because many ecological processes and disturbances occur on such scales. Moreover, landscape-level decision-making processes can improve the efficiency of forest management, as when many owners of small parcels increase the economy of scale of their operations by jointly hiring labor or selling products. Despite the potential benefits of managing at the landscape level, cooperation on management activities across property boundaries is rare among private landowners and poorly understood. We used a comparative case study approach to…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Severe fire weather and intensive forest management increase fire severity in a multi-ownership landscape
Year: 2018
Many studies have examined how fuels, topography, climate, and fire weather influence fire severity. Less is known about how different forest management practices influence fire severity in multi‐owner landscapes, despite costly and controversial suppression of wildfires that do not acknowledge ownership boundaries. In 2013, the Douglas Complex burned over 19,000 ha of Oregon & California Railroad (O&C) lands in Southwestern Oregon, USA. O&C lands are composed of a checkerboard of private industrial and federal forestland (Bureau of Land Management, BLM) with contrasting…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Living with Wildland Fire in America: Building New Bridges between Policy, Science, and Management
Year: 2018
In his October 26, 2017 commentary in these pages, Dr. Tom Zimmerman highlights a number of ongoing and future challenges faced by wildland fire management. To address these challenges he also identifies an important role for science and in particular management-relevant wildland fire research. Here, we first briefly elaborate on Dr. Zimmerman’s challenges and how they relate to new opportunities for the role of science. Second, we focus on three additional institutional or “cultural” barriers or divides that should be acknowledged and addressed when forging a path forward for wildland fire…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Policy Design to Support Forest Restoration: The Value of Focused Investment and Collaboration
Year: 2018
To address rapid change and complex environmental management challenges, governance approaches must support collective action across actors and jurisdictions, and planning at appropriate spatial extents to affect ecological processes. Recent changes in U.S. national forest policy incorporate new tools to facilitate collaborative landscape restoration, providing an opportunity to examine the relationship between policy design and governance change. Based on 151 interviews with agency personnel and partners, and a survey of 425 agency staff members, we investigated how two new policy approaches…
Publication Type: Journal Article
Prescribed Fire Policy Barriers and Opportunities: A Diversity of Challenges and Strategies Across the West
Year: 2018
We are conducting a project investigating policies that limit managers’ ability to conduct prescribed fire on US Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in the 11 Western states. The goals for this phase of our work were to understand the extent to which various policies are limiting prescribed fire programs, strategies to maintain and increase prescribed fire activities, and opportunities for improving policies or policy implementation. To understand the diversity of challenges faced and strategies in use across the West, we conducted a legal analysis of the laws and…
Publication Type: Report
Landscapes 101: Understanding Landscape Approaches to Forest Restoration and Management
Year: 2018
About Go Big or Go Home?: The goals of this research project were to analyze how public land managers and stakeholders in Oregon’s east Cascades can plan and manage at landscape scales using scientific research and participatory simulation modeling (Envision). To learn more, visit: gbgh.forestry.oregonstate.edu
Publication Type: Report
Synthesis of science to inform land management within the Northwest Forest Plan area: executive summary
Year: 2018
This is the executive summary of a three-volume science synthesis that addresses various ecological and social concerns regarding management of federal forests encompassed by the Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP). Land managers with the U.S. Forest Service provided questions that helped guide preparation of the synthesis. It builds on the 10-, 15-, and 20-year NWFP monitoring reports and synthesizes the vast body of relevant scientific literature that has accumulated in the 24 years since the NWFP was initiated. Here we summarize scientific findings and considerations for management that were…
Climate Change and Fire, Communicating about Fire, Fish and Wildlife Habitat, Restoration and Hazardous Fuel Reduction
Publication Type: Report